It is a Rs 5-crore firm providing enterprise resource planning solutions to educational institutions. Abdul Salam and Arun Raveendran have an MBA degree, the rest are engineering graduates.

Hisham and Salam brought Rs 75 lakh in funding — a loan from their sceptical relatives — to kick-start the venture. "They said that in case the business did not succeed, we would stand to lose the most," says Hisham, COO, Foradian. The six quit their jobs in February 2009.

They leased office spaces in Kasargod and Mangalore, and Foradian Technologies was born. "We got into providing Web-based services such as designing websites and developing software for small companies based out of Kerala and Karnataka," says Koroth, CEO, Foradian Technologies.

In 2009, software products for the education sector were generating a lot of demand; Foradian decided to tap the potential. "School management software, available

then, were either SAP-aided, very high-end ones costing millions of dollars, or very cheap ones with no warranty or after-sales service. We decided to place our product somewhere in the middle," says Hisham.

In four months’ time, the Foradian team developed Fedena, its school management software. But in six months, only 10 schools bought the product. "Each of the schools the software was sold to was different from its peers; they all had different requirements. The cost of customizing the software according to their needs entailed service costs, which had to be borne by us," says Koroth.

The team overhauled Fedina and relaunched it in 2010. It offered a free, basic ver-

sion of the product on its website to allow customers to test it. "Those who wanted a customized product had to pay a fee, others could use it for free," says Unni. It worked. In 2009-10, the first year of its operations, the company registered a turnover of Rs 25 lakh. "Of the Rs 25 lakh, around 22 lakh came from services while just Rs 3 lakh came from the product — that would change soon," says Unni.

In the 2010-11, it registered a turnover of Rs 70 lakh — owed mostly to licence fee from Fedena. "We closed down our services division and started concentrating on customization of the software and add-ons," says Hisham.

In 2013-14, Foradian, which now has a staff of 30 and operates out of Bangalore, registered a turnover of Rs 5 crore. It is aiming to double its revenues in 2014-15. "We are developing another product called ‘Uzity’, a learning management software; it would be out soon," reveals Unni.

Foradian’s performance has drawn investor interest. In April 2014, it received $2 million (Rs 12 crore) in funding from William Bissell, MD, Fabindia. "We would now be aggressively marketing and developing our products," says Unni.